The following is a conversation with Pamela McCordock. She is an author who is written on the

history and the philosophical significance of artificial intelligence. Her books include

Machines Who Think in 1979, the fifth generation in 1983 with Ed Fagenbaum, who is considered

to be the father of expert systems, the edge of chaos, they features a woman, and many more books.

I came across her work in an unusual way by stumbling in a quote from Machines Who Think

that is something like artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods.

That was a beautiful way to draw a connecting line between our societal relationship with AI

from the grounded day-to-day science, math, and engineering to popular stories and science fiction

and myths of automatons that go back for centuries. Through her literary work, she has spent a lot

of time with the seminal figures of artificial intelligence, including the founding fathers of AI

from the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Workshop where the field was launched. I reached out to Pamela for

conversation in hopes of getting a sense of what those early days were like and how their dreams

continue to reverberate to the work of our community today. I often don't know where the

conversation may take us, but I jump in and see, having no constraints, rules, or goals is a

wonderful way to discover new ideas. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it,

subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars and iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with

me on Twitter. Alex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N, and now here's my conversation with Pamela McCordock.

In 1979, your book Machines Who Think was published. In it, you interview some of the early AI

pioneers and explore the idea that AI was born not out of maybe math and computer science,

but out of myth and legend. So tell me if you could this story of how you first arrived at the book,

the journey of beginning to write it. I had been a novelist. I'd published two novels, and I was sitting

under the portal at Stanford one day, and the house we were renting for the summer, and I thought,

...